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Jehane Noujaim

Photo: Ahmed Hassan

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Photo: Courtesy of Noujaim Films

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Khalid Abdalla and Ahmed Hassan

Photo: Courtesy of Noujaim Films

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Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim is surprisingly at ease for someone who was repeatedly arrested during the course of making her latest documentary, The Square. Dressed in a striped shirt and loose trousers, the New York–based (“for now”) 39-year-old director, whose previous credits include Startup.com (2001) and Control Room (2004), is quick to crack a smile when recalling an eight-hour interrogation, and generously offers me a tray of cupcakes before sharing stories of trying to film in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the Egyptian Revolution. Incorporating footage shot by activists on the ground (some of it on cell phones), The Square is a fascinating, high-wire artifact of the Arab Spring that focuses on the individuals—an energized young secularist, Ahmed; a conflicted Muslim Brotherhood footman and father named Magdy; the eloquent British actor Khalid Abdalla, star of The Kite Runner—who are redefining Egypt in the post-Mubarak era. Heavily influenced by the sixties-rock documentaries of D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, as well as the verité style of The Battle of Algiers, Noujaim captures the kinetic energy of the Square, taking viewers into the tents to witness not only the most harrowing outbreaks of violence, but also the most uplifting moments of unity, when Egyptians of all backgrounds came together to share a tea, engage in political discourse, and rejoice at the end of a 30-year dictatorship. Noujaim spoke to Vogue.com about her film, which opens in New York on Friday.

You enrolled as an undergraduate at Harvard in 1992 with plans to become a doctor. At what point did you decide to ditch medicine for film?
When I was about fifteen or sixteen, I worked at a place in Egypt where a lot of the garbage collectors live. They didn’t have cameras, so I would take pictures of weddings or funerals, or an older person before they died, or a birth. When I went to Harvard, I did premed, took Chem 5 and organic chemistry, decided that it was not for me, and escaped into the photography labs. I went back to Egypt to do my first photography project with the same people I had taken pictures of when I was sixteen, and had my first exhibit at a conference in Cairo. The photos were at the entrance to the exhibition hall, and the conference organizers were outraged: “Why do we have these international dignitaries here and there are these images of poor kids with a dead donkey beside them? You’re ruining the name of Egypt.” After three days, all of the photographs were taken down. I was both shocked and upset that people had reacted this way, but I was also impressed that an image could create such an intense discussion. Just an image—I didn’t even say anything. I never even opened my mouth. And I thought at the time, I wish that the people that I filmed could speak. So that’s when I really decided that I want to go into filmmaking.

The beginning of the film reveals Tahrir Square to be a place where traditional gender, class, and religious divides were broken down and diverse factions came together to enact change. At what point did the Square become dangerous for women?
It was about a year into the revolution when things started to get very hairy. It’s hard to say without knowing who organized it, but there were mobs of guys in their teens and early twenties that would come into the Square, surround women, and seriously harass and attack them. You knew that these guys were paid because they came in groups and, from the description of people that this happened to, they were on drugs because they had a kind of glazed look on their faces, and if somebody tried to hit them back, they were impervious to pain. When that happened to four or five female friends of mine who were either protestors or filming, it was the first time that I’d ever felt seriously threatened in the Square. It was a concerted effort, I can’t say by whom exactly, to make it an unsafe place for women and to get them out of Tahrir because when women are in a square protesting, it legitimizes the protest.

With The Square, there was no funding, no preproduction, and much of the footage was sourced from activists you met for the first time in the Square. What was it like, technically, to film a revolution?
Before I arrived in Egypt, I picked up a Canon 5D camera because, when I talked to friends on the ground, everybody said that the video camera I had would be confiscated, but that they were still allowing these 5Ds into the country since they look like photography cameras. Ultimately, we had about five cameras confiscated and destroyed during the process. Not only mine, but those of many others on the team. One of the cinematographers, Cressida Trew, filmed that shot of the body being dragged across the street by a policeman and thrown into the garbage. That piece of footage was uploaded onto Mosireen’s website, and during that battle scene, Mosireen became the most highly watched nonprofit YouTube channel in the world. International news networks then picked it up, and everybody knew what was happening in the Square, which then caused people to flock there in massive numbers. It was amazing to watch this process of filming a piece of footage that then leads masses of people to come down to protest. But about three hours after this happened, the Army raided the apartment where we were set up and took all of the cameras and almost all of the footage.

What do you hope to achieve with The Square?
People will be writing books on this for years to come, and there’s already thousands of books about the Arab Spring and the Egyptian Revolution about why this and that happened. But you can never re-create the experience of actually being there for somebody, so it was very important for us to capture that feeling, even if it was only a glimpse of it, of actually being there and putting the viewer right in the middle of it. Our hope is to have the audience feel like they actually lived a revolution, watched a revolution live, lived with those characters, understood where they’ve come from. Then they can read however many books they want to about why things have happened.

What are you working on next?
During the shooting of this, we actually filmed the first presidential election—from inside the Muslim Brotherhood campaign office, from inside the secular campaign, and from inside the office of the military’s guy. So we’re making a film about the vote from these different points of view. But there were some very interesting, crazy moments of filming as well. I’d also like to do something lighter and funnier.

The Square opens in New York on October 25 and in Los Angeles on November 1; thesquarefilm.com.